Fox News takes aim at Media Matters

For seven years, Fox News has pushed back against the daily scrutiny and criticism leveled at it by Media Matters, the liberal watchdog group. But after founder David Brock said in March that his group’s new strategy amounted to a “war on Fox,” the network ratcheted up its response.

In the past 10 days, Fox has run more than 30 segments calling for the nonprofit group to be stripped of its tax-exempt status. Its Fox Nation website has even provided a link to pre-completed complaint forms against Media Matters to send to the Internal Revenue Service. (See also: Can Fox quash its fiercest critic? in The Arena)

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While Fox News personalities like Glenn Beck and Bill O’Reilly have long grumbled about Media Matters, this attack on the group has been carried out across the channel’s news and opinion programs. It has included shows like “The O’Reilly Factor,” news coverage of the complaints to the IRS and even a psychological profile of Brock, a former conservative journalist who went over to the liberal side, on “Fox & Friends” that suggested he might be “full of self-hatred” because he was adopted.

“Media Matters is not a media investigative organization,” Fox News contributor and Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer said on “Special Report With Bret Baier” last week. “It’s a war on Fox. And you’re allowed to do that in a democracy. You can be as nasty as you want. The only thing is, don’t ask for a government subsidy.”

To get tax-free status, educational nonprofits have to support their claims with facts and refrain from directly engaging in politics — though they can be as ideological as they like. Fox argues that Media Matters has veered from that educational mission and should be stripped of its special status.

Its argument was first laid out in a June 22 column in the Washington Times by C. Boyden Gray, former President George H.W. Bush’s White House counsel, who cited two actions by Media Matters: its “unsupported” claims about Fox News being the voice of the Republican Party and a “sophisticated, Democratic-leaning media training boot camp” sponsored by the group that, Gray said, in essence, provided support to the Democratic Party.

“The declaration of war itself is a rhetorical device,” said Gray, a former Fox News consultant. “But when you go further and make allegations that are not substantiated, then it slips into, ‘Wow, this looks like it’s for and in support of the Democratic Party. … It’s absurd to say that Fox is the Republican Party. There’s no factual basis for that.’”

Ari Rabin-Havt, executive vice president of Media Matters, denies both allegations, pointing to the organization’s research on how Fox News, its employees and its parent companies “engaged in an unprecedented campaign in support of the Republican Party” during the 2010 election cycle.

“Our contentions about Fox News’s political operations are supported by the facts and their own actions, especially during the previous few years,” he said.

Regarding questions about the media training boot camp, profiled in a March 22 Washington Post story, Rabin-Havt said the training institute explicitly asks potential students whether they plan to run for office or work for a political campaign and declines to train them if they do.

“Our training institute trains progressive voices but not political ones,” he said. “We are not training candidates. We are not training political campaign employees.”